Eyes, Lies & Illusions
7 October – 3 January
www.hayward-gallery.org.uk
The dark, windowless caverns of the Hayward
are an appropriately tenebrous venue for a show that celebrates the wonders
of luminous phenomena. Juggling academic research with fairground acts,
science with popular entertainment, the exhibition extols the viewer to
‘enter a world of optical wonders … see images from magic lanterns … marvel
at the illusion of the world … be tricked by the many visual puzzles’.
Little wonder, then, that explanation and exegesis are largely eschewed in
favour of fun.
Chiefly curated by the owner of much of the collection, the German
experimental film-maker Werner Nekes, ‘Eyes, Lies & Illusions’ collects
together a range of drawings, texts, instruments and toys relating to the
development of the arts of seeing, which roughly began in the Renaissance
and culminated over a century ago with the birth of cinema. Nekes has
amassed a trove of machinery and imagery, much of which he has animated
through his series of films Media Magica, the entirety of which was screened
concurrently at London’s National Film Theatre and Goethe Institute.
Regrettably, few extracts are projected within the exhibition; playful toys
desperate to be wound or flicked or spun, large lenses or optic artefacts
hungry for intervention lie mostly immobile and inactive beneath
prophylactic vitrines.
The wide range of displayed work is suffused with the spirit of invention,
continually reminding the viewer of the indebtedness of current
special-effects technologies to much older experimentation. We can trace
Saul Bass’s op-art back beyond even Duchamp’s 1930s rotating Rotoreliefs to
the spiral movements of the nineteenth-century Phenakistiscope and
eighteenth-century anamorphosis, or Terminator 3’s sinister figural morphs
back to Johann Rudolph Schellenberg’s 1780 watercolour of a woman
transforming into a tigress.
But where the show succeeds in conveying the history and continuity of a
consuming enthusiasm for moving images and magic shows, merging laboratories
with cabinets of curiosity, its sheer abundance threatens to dilute the
power of the most important discoveries. The camera lucida – the title for
Marina Warner’s introductory catalogue essay and the crucial link between
the static architecture of the camera obscura and the portable photographic
machine we know today – is buried among the armies of wooden boxes,
punctured cards, paper templates, spinning discs, and other myriad
instruments with pseudo-scientific Greek names like anorthoscope,
praxinoscope and thaumatrope.
In 1920, 25 years after he had abandoned his ground-breaking forays into
cinema for the invention and manufacture of photographic equipment, Louis
Lumičre developed the cinematographe, a process which, though it wonderfully
prefigured in 3-dimensions the depth of image of the hologram, left only 12
examples to posterity. The poignancy and beauty of his 1920
photo-stereo-synthesis-process portrait of his brother Auguste, composed of
photos of varying focal lengths arrayed sequentially on closely-packed
layers of thin glass to form a picture of literally variant depth, is
slightly lost among the mound of neighbouring stereoscopic viewers, 3-d
Levi’s posters and other paraphernalia.
The exhibition ends with glimpses of the glories of mature proto-cinematic
work, when the blackness of inks ceded to the whiteness of lights. Pride of
place is given to the majestic chronophotographs taken in quick succession
first by Eadweard Muybridge and then Etienne-Jules Marey, the latter
responsible for converting a rifle into a machine for literally ‘shooting’
images at 12 frames per second. The accompanying contemporary work, however,
rarely matches the vision, wit or genius of the earlier experiments. The
obligatory hall of mirrors, giant lenses and Ames Room (whereby people
walking to and fro within a perspectivally-distorted space seem to grow or
shrink in relation to an apparently orthogonal room) offer robust but
predictable funfair pleasures.
Anthony McCall’s filmic installation, Line describing a Cone (1973), offers
perhaps the most successful progression, using a smoky room for the
projection of an arc that, over 30 minutes, gradually increases its
circumference from a single point to a full circle. Not only is the work
viewed backwards as a shaft of light as much as a frontal projection on to a
screen, but viewers immersed within its growing luminous boundary must
negotiate with each other to avoid obscuring the hallowed image. The work
not only accentuates the politics of vision, but transports us back in time
to pre-Victorian works of equal economy and clarity, recalling the naďve
verve of Camille Flammarion’s dreams of travelling along light beams and the
ongoing artistic project of wreaking magic from technology.
Alex Haw